Bannon: Same Causes of Roman Empire’s Decline Can Be Seen in America Today

In a new biography by Keith Koffler, Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon shares his reminiscences about Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, calling the tome one of his six most formative influences, and comparing America’s challenges to those to which our forebearers succumbed.
“I’m not a multiculturalist,” Bannon relates in Bannon: Always the Rebel, explaining:

America has “an underlying culture, that has been passed down from Jerusalem, to Athens, to Rome, to London. It’s the belief in self-reliance, it’s the belief in the self-determination of the individual. It’s freedom to be the traditional family. The culture that is our way of life. I think it’s absolutely vital and important. And we have an obligation to those that came before us as much as we have an obligation to the people in the future to pass that down.”

The Romans, Bannon gleans from Gibbon, “[Are] the people most like us. … They built this great empire and how it all slipped away over time.”